The Appointment (for Nelly)

Antwerp seems designed to thwart the visitor. In the car, the streets lead you a dance and suddenly you’re back on the road heading out. Come in by train and there’s always the nagging uncertainty of which station you’re after – a moment’s indecision and it’s only another few hours until Amsterdam.

Once you’re in, there’s the diamond district: men with wide-brimmed hats, beards, walking with unfathomable purpose. They disappear down side roads or through pincoded doorways. Invisibility and CCTV go hand in hand – you’re being watched (by whom?). A stone’s throw away and it’s porn stores and peep shows. Here you pay to go in and watch other people. It’s a different system of exchange, the body as commodity. The girls in the windows have fake tans and fake skin. An effect of the light? It seems plastified, they’re real living dolls. There are prices in the windows on cheap boards, the type you get in tacky restaurants or downmarket barbers.

But we weren’t here for diamonds or girls – it was Art we were after. A different racket entirely (forgetting Damien Hirst). We traipsed around trying to read the map as well as the odd landmark looming over the rooftops. As so often it was not quite where we thought it was or the map suggested.

Up some stairs and there’s a woman in a lurid cardigan left holding the baby. Not what we’d expected either. After a little misunderstanding she realised we were among the ‘Invited’. A green stamp applied to the hand. Suitably stigmatized we prepared to enter.

A thread of lights led the way downstairs. Obviously the disused cellars of some municipal building. Grand once upon a time but now down on its luck. We find ourselves in a circular rooom with corridors and rooms leading off. I follow my nose – perhaps unwise in such surroundings: rat space, urinous corners, and what other horrors were lurking in wait? Another corridor with pipes and cables running its length – it felt like entering a flayed limb. And, finally, there it is: the purpose of our visit.

He was lying in a bed, propped up on pillows, as I recall only part of the torso was visible above the sheet. It didn’t seem appropriate to take pictures. Were we meant to be here? Had we ignored visiting hours? A thin cable plugged into the wall ran along the floor and disappeared (worryingly) under the sheet. The face was disturbing, too. An uncanny mixture of gaunt messiah and child molester. The skin seemed familiar – that unreal quality – not sex trade here but jaundiced corpse.

Then the voice started on an endless monologue. I leant against the door jamb appalled and amused by turns. Pinter, Beckett, graveyard humour plus that old uncle who bores you stiff. Didn’t he go on? That deadpan voice – I tried to place the accent – could it even be someone I recognised? Alan Bennett on a bad day, Robert Wyatt ... one of the voices between tracks on Dark Side of the Moon. Flat, lifeless, passionless. A has-been knowing it had all been said before and was going to be said all over again. Molloy in his mother’s room. The womb:tomb. My end is in my beginning. To kingdom come. Amen. I began to be aware of a slight movement under the sheets. A pump I supposed. Not the life support machine of a hospital but a mechanical parody of lungs. Creepy stuff.

I left before he finished (he was finished anyway). Walking away I looked back. Still there. Good bye. Come again. It was like exiting a burial chamber in a pyramid or an NHS ward savaged by cuts. Too raw for me, perhaps, the memories of a cremation just the week before. I’m squeamish, truth be told, dislike doctors’ surgeries, dentists - even taking the cats to the vet gives me the jitters.

We made it back to street level, up into thin grey Flemish light. We talked about the show – seventeeth century anatomy lessons, public executions, morgues, memento mori, old-fashioned Chamber of Horrors and the ghost train. I’m glad such art exists and that someone’s doing it – but I wouldn’t want it in the living room, dear. And thank God I didn’t take the kids.